DANTE Goes Multi-Terabit

With Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) obviously kicking off its DTN-X launch, you knew there had to be a research network in there somewhere. And so there is. DANTE has picked the Infinera's new gear to help power GÉANT's next generation Multi-Terabit pan-European optical network upgrade. Nothing creates big data like big science nowadays.

DANTE will be deploying capacity in 500Gbps superchannel chunks to connect 17 cities across 16 countries via 12,000km of fiber. The biggest bandwidth ticket on that route is of course CERN with its Large Hadron Collider and other projects, which were already working with 100G gear from Ciena from another angle (SurfNet). I'm sure Ciena wanted this one too, in fact. While Infinera will handle the transport, the switching job will go to Imtech.

The most interesting tidbit here though is the amount of bandwidth available to a single user, which they say will be 100Gbps. Yep, a few clicks and one guy (or gal) could be using 100Gbps from his cubicle... and some say data hogs don't exist!